'N Sync bandmate of Justin Timberlake / MON 6-16-25 / Some bygone theaters / Short stiletto shoe / Slanted edges, as on mirrors / Yahoo alternative

Constructor: Jill Rafaloff and Michelle Sontarp

Relative difficulty: Easy (easiest Downs-only I've ever done, possibly)

THEME: BABY (64A: The first word of 18-, 23-, 36-, 49- or 56-Across is one) — first words of theme answers are BABY animals:

Theme answers:

• KITTEN HEEL (18A: Short stiletto shoe)
• JOEY FATONE (23A: 'N Sync bandmate of Justin Timberlake)
• PUPPY LOVE (36A: What a first crush might be dismissed as)
• CALF MUSCLE (49A: Spot that may be affected by a charley horse)
• CHICK FLICK (56A: Movie marketed toward a primarily female audience, informally)

Word of the Day: Make Way For Ducklings (9D: Setting for "Make Way for Ducklings" = POND) —

Make Way for Ducklings is an American children's picture book written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey. First published in 1941 by the Viking Press, the book centers on a pair of mallards who raise their brood of ducklings on an island in the lagoon in the Boston Public Garden. It won the 1942 Caldecott Medal for McCloskey's illustrations, executed in charcoal then lithographed on zinc plates. As of 2003, the book had sold over two million copies. The book's popularity led to the construction of a statue by Nancy Schön in the Public Garden of the mother duck and her eight ducklings, which is a popular destination for children and adults alike. In 1991, Barbara Bush gave a duplicate of this sculpture to Raisa Gorbacheva as part of the START Treaty, and the work is displayed in Moscow's Novodevichy Park.

The book is the official children's book of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Praise for the book is still high over 80 years since its first publication, mainly for the enhancing illustrations and effective pacing. The book is popular worldwide.

• • •

While this puzzle is solid in many ways, it's also way too remedial for the NYTXW. If you could see some of the puzzles that the NYT is rejecting these days, you'd be baffled by how something as straightforward and, frankly, stale this got accepted. I was dead certain that someone *must* have done a theme exactly like this before, possibly many times, probably sometime in the early '00s or earlier, and boy was I not wrong. It took me no time at all to find that it had been done at least twice—once by Liz Gorski in 2000, and another time by Stella Zawistowski and Bruce Venzke in 2007. And yes, it's true, most people will not remember that far back, but I know many constructors out there, pros and aspiring pros, who work so hard to come up with original themes only to have the vast majority of what they submit get rejected ... and if you're them and you see something like this get published, some little part of you has to be thinking "how? why?" Again, it is not a badly made puzzle. It's not terribly imaginative, but it's coherent, and the grid is notably clean and solid. But the revealer is a total letdown—completely unnecessary, in fact—and the only way this puzzle distinguishes itself from its predecessors (beyond the unnecessary revealer) is that it has five themers instead of four. The answers are slightly different—KITTEN HEEL is a new one, and this one lacks the CUB REPORTER that the others had (which was the first alternative theme answer I thought of, along with KIT CARSON and maybe, I dunno, pick a KID any KID: Cudi? Charlemagne? Rock? Ew, not Rock. But you get the idea). But on the whole this is just a barely warmed-over theme that was only so-so to begin with. All you gotta do is search your prospective theme answers in the database to see if they've been used before, and if so, in what capacity. If you find someone has done your theme before, but yours offers something really fresh and new, that's OK. Otherwise, go back to the drawing board.

[R.I.P., Brian Wilson]

What was interesting about looking back at earlier puzzles with this theme was the JOEY evolution. Solving Downs-only, I got the JOEY part pretty quickly, and I really thought the answer was going to be JOEY RAMONE (used once before, in a Tim Croce themeless, 2013). He's an iconic figure of '70s punk. But then OFF-DUTY (21D: Not working, as a police officer) gave me the "F" and made me remember JOEY FATONE, as well as this JOEY FATONE-themed die-cast metal hotrod I bought at Toys 'R' Us around the turn of the century for $1.18, Why!? 

Annnnnyway, after I was done, I searched JOEY FATONE to see if I could find out if this theme had been done before that way, but no: this is in fact a debut for Mr. Fatone's full name! Next I searched CHICK FLICK, and that's how I found the first version of this theme (2000). That puzzle also used Joey, but a different Joey: JOEY BISHOP. So this puzzle gets some credit for finding a more modern JOEY, and yet ... JOEY FATONE is about as "modern" now as JOEY BISHOP was in 2000, i.e. not terribly modern. The 2007 incarnation of this puzzle went with JOEY LAWRENCE, which, for its time period, is probably the most "modern" Joey of the bunch. Weird to me that none of these puzzles went with JOEY RAMONE, which, for me, is the best Joey option. The point is, there is no cultural consensus on who is the go-to Joey at this point in time. Not an issue you ever thought you'd find yourself considering, is it?

Another weird thing I discovered is that CHICK FLICK had a twenty-four (24!)-year hiatus before today's appearance. That seems very long. Actually, it got used in the plural in that 2007 version of this puzzle, but still, that's eighteen years. I would've expected an answer that colloquial and rhyming and bouncy to have snuck its way into some puzzle somewhere—a themeless, if nowhere else. Maybe people shy away from it because it sounds a bit derogatory, and certainly has been used by men that way for decades. I wouldn't normally use the term, for that reason, but I kinda like it as a phrase. It's got some life, some pizzazz. The other theme answers are fine as standalone phrases, and the grid overall, as I say, is very smooth, with a bunch of nice mid-range (6-7-letter) fill. There are real grid skills on display here. I just wish the theme were more ... something. Anything.

Bullet points:

• 30A: Vaccine-approving org. (FDA) — kind of dark, ironic humor here, having "Vaccine-approving" and RFK in the same grid (5D: ___ Stadium, former D.C. sports venue)
• 35A: Slanted edges, as on mirrors (BEVELS) — good word. Solving this Downs-only, I needed every cross but the "V" before I could guess it, which reminded me of that time (a long long time ago) when I faced a similar letter pattern in a crossword (BE-EL) and the clue was something like [Chisel face] or [Gem holder] and I thought "huh, must be BEVEL and the answer ended up being BEZEL, a word I'd never seen before in my life. Seems like kind of a cruel joke that one of the definitions of BEZEL is "A groove or flange designed to hold a beveled edge, as of a gem" (wordnik). Anyway, that "V" was crucial in my being able to get ADHESIVE (10D: Sticky stuff), the only Down that required multiple passes. Well, the only one besides ...
• 7D: Outset (GET-GO) — I had INTRO
• 23D: Bird whose name sounds like a letter of the alphabet (JAY) — first instinct here was the most common of three-letter birds: EMU. But that ... sounds like two letters of the alphabet (Roman, Greek), not one.  

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Here are the grids from those 2000 and 2007 puzzles that have this same theme, for comparison (both images taken from xwordinfo)

[Gorski, 2000]

[Zawistowski / Venzke, 2007]

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